Tag: @play

Upcoming: Roguelike Celebration 2025

It’s a time for annual reminders, so here I am holding up a sign, reading “ROGUELIKE CELEBRATION THIS WAY ->“. And another sign, “<- ROGUELIKE CELEBRATION SHOP’S OVER HERE!” And a third sign, “ROGUELIKE CELEBRATION STEAM SALE AROUND THAT CORNER ⤷!” Yes, I’m carrying three signs. It’s a trick I picked up from Zaphod Beeblebrox.

This year it’s happening between Saturday and Sunday, October 25-26. That’s the day after tomorrow! There’s an unusually good roster this year, and I don’t just say that because I helped find speakers for it this year.

We’ve already had a preview event with a couple of great talks, including a real star, Jon Perry, who created two of the best games in UFO 50, Mini & Max and Party House. While I spent a lot of time with Mini & Max uncovering its many secrets, it’s but a small fraction of the time I’ve played Party House. (If you want to hear Jon Perry’s talk, from September, you can find it here, as well as Ezra Stanton’s talk on Synergy Networks in roguelikes, and Alexei Pepers’ Designing for System Suspense.)

I’ve already gushed voluminously about Party House here. Let’s move on to this year’s talk schedule. Times given here are Eastern/Pacific/GMT. (The later times in GMT are pushed into the following day.)

Saturday, October 25th

TimeSpeakerTalk
12:30 PM
9:30 AM
6:30 PM		Michael BroughThe Roots of Roguelikes in Fantasy Fiction
1 PM
10 AM
7 PM		Sébastien “deepnight” BenardMixing Hand-Crafted Content with Procgen to Achieve Quality
1:30 PM
10:30 AM
7:30 PM		Max SahinStuff: The Behavioral Science of Inventory
1:45 PM
10:45 AM
7:45 PM		Florence Smith NichollsRoll for Reminiscence: Procedural Keepsake Games
2:30 PM
11:30 AM
8:30 PM		Alexander Birke and Sofie Kjær SchmidtHoist the Colours! Art Direction and Tech Art in Sea Of Rifts, A Naval Story Generation RPG
3 PM
Noon
9 PM		bleeptrackFrom Code to Craft: Procedural Generation for the Physical World
3:30 PM
12:30 PM
9:30 PM		Zeno RogueThe Best Genre for a Non-Euclidean game
4:30 PM
1:30 PM
10:30 PM		Cole WehrlePlay as Procedural Generation: Oath as a Roguelike Strategy Game
5 PM
2 PM
11 PM		Jeff LaitTeaching Long Term Consequences in Games
6 PM
3 PM
Midnight		RayA Mythopoetic Interface Reading of Caves of Qud
6:15 PM
3:15 PM
12:15 AM		Johnathan PagnuttiWait, No, Hear Me Out: Simulating Encounter AI in Slay the Spire with SQL
6:30 PM
3:30 PM
12:30 AM		Jamie BrewRobot Karaoke Goes Electric
7:30 PM
4:30 PM
1:30 AM		Stephen G. WarePlanning and Replanning Structured Adaptive Stories: 25 Years of History
8 PM
5 PM
2 AM		Tyriq PlummerScrubbin’ Trubble: The Journey to Multiplayer Roguelikery
8:15 PM
5:15 PM
2:15 AM		Andrew DoullRoguelike Radio 2011-Present

Sunday, October 26th

TimeSpeakerTalk
12:45 PM
9:45 AM
6:45 PM 		Ada NullDyke Sex and Ennui: Generating Unending Narrative in “Kiss Garden”
1 PM
10 AM
7 PM 		Younès RabiiWe Are Maxwell’s Demons: The Thermodynamics of Procedural Generators
1:30 PM
10:30 AM
7:30 PM 		Dennis GregerThe Procedurality of Reality TV Design – An Overview
4:15 PM
1:15 PM
10:15 PM 		Paul DeanPicking up the Pieces: Building Story in a Roguelike World
4:45 PM
1:45 PM
10:45 PM 		Patrick Belanger and Jackson WagnerHand-Crafted Randomness: Storytelling in Wildermyth’s Proc-Gen World
5:15 PM
2:15 PM
11:15 PM 		NifflasMusic algorithm showcase
6:15 PM
3:15 PM
12:15 AM 		Seth CooperBuilding a Roguelike with a Tile Rewrite Language
6:30 PM
3:30 PM
12:30 AM 		Quinten KonynAnatomy of a Morgue File
6:45 PM
3:45 PM
12:45 AM 		Alexander KingDon’t Pick Just One: Set-Based Card Mechanics in Roguelike-Deckbuilders
7 PM
4 PM
1 AM 		Brian CroninPlaytesting Process for Ultra Small Teams
8 PM
5 PM
2 AM 		Mark GritterSol LeWitt, Combinatorial Enumeration, and Rogue
8:15 PM
5:15 PM
2:15 AM 		Dan DiIorioLuck be a Landlord – 10 Lessons Learned
8:45 PM
5:45 PM
2:45 AM 		Liza KnipscherThe Form and Function of Weird Li’l Guys: Procedural Organism Generation in a Simulated Ecosystem

If some of these talks seem like they’re spaced closely together, some of them are “lightning talks,” very short. Those have their titles in italics in the above list.

If you follow indie gaming circles, there are a fair number of exciting speakers among the talks! Jeff Lait (homepage) has made twenty highly interesting roguelikes, many as 7DRLs. Nifflas of course is the creator of Within a Deep Forest, the Knytt games, Affordable Space Adventures and others. Dan DiIorio is the creator of the oft-mentioned (at least in my hearing) Luck be a Landlord, and Zeno Rogue makes the long-lived, and brain-bending, HyperRogue.

And make sure to have a look at the Redbubble and Steam links too! In this year’s Steam selection, MidBoss and Shattered Pixel Dungeon are already on sale.

Gamefinds: mumble mumble Dungeons of Infinity

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

Writing about Nintendo fangames is fraught. Not that something might happen to me, the insidious grasp of their legal team doesn’t stretch that far yet, but for the games being written about. Remember AM2R, a fan remake of Metroid II that many believe was superior to Nintendo’s own revision? Then some big sites mentioned it, Nintendo heard about it, and they sent the creator a nastygram demanding they take it down. Set aside the fact that the game can still be readily obtained from numerous other sources; it still dumped a big bucket of freezing cold water on the hard work of its maker, which is hardly a way to treat fans, especially since the company’s prosperity depends on their good will. Nintendo must be really certain those enthusiasts won’t reject them.

About our own blog, I don’t think anyone at Nintendo personally reads Set Side B. I’m sure their well-paid legal staff has plenty better things to do than read an obscure little daily retro/niche/indie blog, even if it’s one that posts articles on their products really often. But it does seem possible that someone at Nintendo might run a spider, an automated program that scans the internet for derivative works related to their products.

Not romhacks, mind you. For some reason Nintendo doesn’t take a lot of interest in romhacks of their work in most cases. But fanwork that uses their IP in one way or other has been known to attract the attention of the legal Warios. That is why AM2R got stomped upon by the Kuribo’s Shoe of Civil Law, and it’s why Zelda Online had to retitle to Graal Online (a project that continues to this day under that name).

I tell you this so you’ll know why I don’t give the full name of the project I’m going to refer solely by the second half of its title: Dungeons of Infinity. Any person looking at the screenshots will be able to easily tell what game it’s referring to, and uses assets from, but web crawlers won’t, or at least I won’t make it any easier for them than the Youtube videos that contain footage of its play. If you figure you want to try it, which I hope you will, if you search for it you’ll probably find it. I’ll help you out by telling you it’s not the board game Dungeons of Infinity, which had a Kickstarter in 2024. Many of the top hits for that phrase will be about that, but not all of them. I trust you’ll be able to tell them apart.

(mumble) is gray here because he’s been cursed! Curses rarely and randomly spring from chests that are opened, and impose some restriction upon play, like making shops sell things for higher prices, or making hearts hurt you instead of heal. Each curse has a randomized lifting requirement.

Most of the things I like about (mumble mumble): Dungeons of Infinity are not related to the game from which it borrows. If they could find some helpful people to make similar graphics in the same style, and changed the name, they might be able to escape danger entirely, but that might require time and effort the creator doesn’t have. Whatever be its trappings, it’s a pretty cool random dungeon exploration game in its own right. It has a pretty active Discord. Its creator mentions there that they’ve recently lost interest in working on the game so its current version, 1.2.1, will probably be its last. It’s still pretty cool as it stands.

So the idea is, like in the other games in the series of, um, The Saga of Fitzgerald’s Wife, is to pilot a green-suited elf kid through dangerous and tricky dungeons and caverns full of monsters and traps, collecting items and uncovering secrets. What’s different is that the game is much more linear than those other games (much like the Four Swords Adventures titles), and the rooms and their arrangements are randomly determined. So… also like the Four Swords Adventures games, although this one is purely for solo play.

The Armos Knights, from The Saga of Fitzgerald’s Wife: A Connection to Previous Times, are much harder than in the original, without their former weaknesses. Arrows don’t seem to even harm them. (EDIT: DoI’s creator reached out and said they are vulnerable to arrows, it’s just the last phase of the fight, when there’s just one left,that it becomes immune.)

If you explore throughly enough you’ll always find a way forward, the game isn’t designed to give you unsolvable situations. But what can change, and quite a lot at that, is the items that you find. Weapons like the Bow, the Hookshot or the Boomerang have to be found, or sometimes bought, if you want to use them. None of these items are required to win, but without certain items, like Sword and Tunic upgrades, or extra Heart Containers, you’ll find the going much more difficult.

There are some pretty tricky secrets in this game. Try to remember all the different ways things could be hidden in the previous game.

In fact, probably the game’s biggest drawback is that it falls prey, a bit, to fangame difficuly malaise. Bosses that in the original game aren’t hugely difficult here are tenacious damage sponges. Everything in the game has been tuned to be that little bit more difficult: you have less health, sources of healing are less common, and enemies take more damage. Due to the nature of difficulty, all of these individual sources of peril multiply together and become much harder than the sum of its parts. And (mumble mumble): Dungeons of Infinity is a permadeath game: if you take too much damage and run out of hearts, the adventure ends, so to keep going you have to start over from the beginning, fighting all the early enemies once again, and building a whole new collection of random items. If you’re not up for a challenge, well, you probably shouldn’t bother downloading it.

Here’s some details that it might be useful to know:

To be frank, the many dark rooms in (mumble mumble) Dungeons of Infinity are probably my least favorite part of it. You don’t get the helpful cone of vision in dark areas here, and lit torches only light up a small area around them. There is an item that can give you a bit more visibility.
  • You have a very limited inventory space. You can only hold five items by default. The bow & its arrows count as separate items too, as do your bombs and any healing items you find. You can find, or (more likely) buy inventory expansions, and there are items that help keep other items from taking up inventory spaces, but you’ll frequently have to make difficult choices for what to keep.
  • On the other hand, items you drop, or don’t have room to collect, don’t disappear. They’ll remain on the ground in the room they were dropped or found in until you come back for them, or else take the downstairs (you don’t get to backtrack to previous floors). If you hold off on collecting hearts when you’re at full health, then when you do take damage, you can come back to pick them up later.
  • Aiding in this, enemies that you defeat never return. It’s possible to clear whole dungeon floors of monsters, making them much safer to explore.
  • In the bottom-right corner of the HUD, there’s a vertical map of all the dungeon levels, which gives you the low-down on where the bosses are. It also marks the location of save points. In the true spirit of permadeath these points are only for taking breaks, not for continually restoring from, but seeing as how the game is fairly long it’s good to take advantage of them, and refresh the mental batteries for a bit before tackling the next leg of the quest.
  • It’s a shame that it’s pretty far into the game, but in the rebel village area on the 6th floor there’s an arcade with a pretty decent remake of arcade classic Berzerk in it, as well as an endless runner version of Pitfall with a recreation of the music from Pitfall II: Lost Caverns! If you get a few rooms into the Berzerk remake, you’ll find another mini-game, within that mini-game. I don’t know how deep this recursive ouroboros of gaming goes, but it’s a very nice touch.
This is a screenshot of the Berzerk remake in the village arcade. I wish this and the Pitfall-inspired endless runner could be played stand-alone!

Roguelike Celebration 2025 Call for Proposals Extended

I’m helping out with Roguelike Celebration 2025, the now ten-year-running conference-like thing about all things roguelike, roguelite, and roguelike-adjacent. Yes, I’ve presented there three times so far, and figured it was time to give back!

While RC got its start as an in-person conference, when the pandemic hit they switched over to being entirely virtual, presented through video feed. All of their talks end up posted online, so anyone can see them for years after. But if you can attend during the conference you can participate in chat, ask questions of the speakers, and explore a very clever MUD-like chat interface!

I’ve tried to spread the word about Roguelike Celebration where I can, through social media and this very blog here. Every year they have several very interesting talks that, if you read Set Side B, I know you’d be interested in seeing. They’ve hosted Tarn Adams, co-creator of Dwarf Fortress, the creators of the original Rogue, and many other thoughtful speakers.

This year Roguelike Celebration takes place October 25-26. They sell tickets, but they also let people who are strapped for cash apply for a free ticket. (If you can pay for admission though, please do, as it takes money to run an event like this.)

And if you have a roguelike, or even vaguely-related project, please please please answer their Call For Proposals, to apply to present your work to their devoted audience of extremely thoughtful attendees! The CFP site is here, and their deadline has been extended to July 20th, so you have about three weeks to get in your proposal!

Give it a shot, it’s a great way to spread the word about roguelike work, or about a procedurally-generated game you’re interested in, or just something you think the world should know about.

By volume most game players, let’s be frank, are interested in the big AAA productions. But there are lots of people out there who are willing to give indies a chance, which roguelike games often are, and we have to stick together. Not only to talk with each other and build those connections, but to do it in public, non-corporate venues. Reddit largely is a sham these days, more interested in monetizing their userbase, and Discord isn’t web-searchable, and requires navigating a maze of requests that you upgrade to “Nitro.”

I do not lie: little volunteer-run organizations like Roguelike Celebration are a lot closer to the true spirit of the internet, and the World Wide Web, than those are. So please keep them in your thoughts, if you can buy a ticket, and if you have something to present, answer their CFP! You won’t regret any of those things.

7DRL 2025

It got by me this year, but the now 20-year-old 7 Day Roguelike Challenge, a gamejam where people try to construct a complete roguelike within a week’s time, finished up Saturday.

Not only has it been around a long time, but a number of games have come out of it that went on to greater things. Jupiter Hell got its start as a 7DRL project called DoomRL. The amazing Jeff Lait has made a ton of 7DRLs, and many of them have some awesome twist, like a game where you can make portals, but where the portals result in the world through them being rotated and possibly allowing you to get mixed up!

Jeff Lait’s Jacob’s Matrix

There’s regular several very interesting games in the challenge each year! Its itch.io page is here. This year’s theme was, simply, “roguelike,” and 819 people have joined it so far! I can’t wait to see what they’ve made!

Ancient Roguelike Lore: 50 Ways To Leave Your Game

Boudewijn Wayers was the creator of the very first Nethack Home Page. I have no idea where he is now, but he’s listed among the alumni of the Nethack Dev Team.

He wrote a spoiler for Nethack called To Die: 50 Ways to Leave Your Game, which was a cataloging of ways to die in that game. This used to be available in several locations on the World Wide Web, but now I can only find it in one place. To help preserve it for later generations, I paste it below in full.

I feel that first I should say a word about how Nethack pages have become scarce lately. The old Steelypips spoiler site is still active, but many of the other sites it links to have perished. (Some of them have academic URLs, and have probably fallen victim to the declining web investment of universities. To think in my lifetime I’ve seen the rise and subsequent abandonment of the internet as a tool of knowledge. I blame social media!)

I should see about preserving old spoiler documents on the living internet, but until I get something put together, here is Boudewijn Wayers’ list of ways to die in Nethack.

50 ways to leave your game
============================
by Boudewijn Wayers (kroisos@win.tue.nl).

There has been talk on the net lately about various ways to get killed.
Well, apart from being killed by a monster hitting you, there are lots
of other ways… Some of these other things you can be killed by are
mentioned here (I don’t claim to have noticed them all, but I think I
did):

a blast of acid
a blast of disintegration
a blast of fire
a blast of frost
a blast of lightning
a blast of missiles
a blast of poison gas
a blast of sleep gas
a bolt of cold
a bolt of fire
a bolt of lightning
a burst of flame
a carnivorous bag
a closing drawbridge
a cockatrice corpse
a collapsing drawbridge
a cone of cold
a contact-poisoned spellbook
a contaminated potion
a cursed throne
a death ray
a falling drawbridge
a falling object
a falling rock
a finger of death
a fireball
a genocide spell
a land mine
a magic missile
a magical explosion
a mildly contaminated potion
a potion of holy water
a potion of unholy water
a psychic blast
a residual undead turning effect
a scroll of fire
a scroll of genocide
a sleep ray
a system shock
a thrown potion
a touch of death
a tower of flame
a wand
acid
an alchemic blast
an electric chair
an electric shock
an exploding chest
an exploding crystal ball
an exploding drawbridge
an exploding item being destroyed
an exploding ring
an exploding rune
an exploding wand
an explosion
an iron ball collision
an object thrown at you
an unrefrigerated sip of juice
an unsuccessful polymorph
brainlessnes
bumping into a boulder
bumping into a door
colliding with the ceiling
contaminated water
drowning
eating a cadaver
eating a cockatrice corpse
eating a cockatrice egg
eating a poisonous corpse
eating a poisonous weapon
eating a rotten lump of royal jelly
eating an acidic corpse
eating the Medusa’s corpse
eating too rich a meal
exhaustion
falling downstairs
jumping out of a bear trap
kicking a ladder
kicking a rock
kicking a sink
kicking a throne
kicking a wall
kicking an altar
kicking something weird
kicking the drawbridge
kicking the stairs
leg damage from being pulled out of a bear trap
looking at the Medusa
molten lava
overexertion
sipping boiling water
sitting in lava
sitting on an iron spike
strangulation
swallowing a cockatrice whole
the wrath of
touching a cockatrice corpse
trying to tin a cockatrice without gloves

Other ways to die:

caught himself in his own tower of flame
committed suicide
crunched in the head by an iron ball
dragged downstairs by an iron ball
fell from a drawbridge
fell into a chasm
fell into a pit
fell into a pit of iron spikes
fell onto a sink
killed himself with his pick-axe
quit while already on Charon’s boat
shot himself with a death ray
squished under a boulder
starvation
teleported out of the dungeon and fell to his death
unwisely ate the body of Death/Hunger/Pestilence
using a magical horn on himself
went to heaven prematurely
zapped himself with a spell
zapped himself with a wand

That’s all of it. Thanks for reading it, and thanks Boudewijn, wherever you are.

Roguelike Radio, and I’m in it!

It’s been a long time since I’ve recorded an episode of the podcast Roguelike Radio, not just because it was on hiatus for some years, but also because I fell away from it for a while because of Life Terrible Life. But I’m back, and it’s here, and also in it is Rob “ASCII Dracula” Parker, who has a really great pseudonym.

It’s on the most recent Shiren the Wanderer game, The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island, a.k.a. Shiren 6, and I hope I’m not spoiling things when I say it’s really fun. The episode is an hour and a half, we had a great time recording it, and here it is!

Roguelike Radio #159: Shiren 6, with Rob Parker and John Harris (1h29m)

How the AI Works in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Rescue Team Red and Blue

Despite the words’ lack in the title, the two videos linked here, both made by Some Body, are all about roguelike behavior, and likely have implications for Chunsoft’s Mystery Dungeon engine generally, from which the Rescue Games derive.

In terms of depth, this post is rated 4 out of 5: highly detailed information for obsessed fans and game designers.

The first (28m):

And, the second (44m), it goes further into the weeds and is longer:

So, here’s a tl;dw overview of the first video. Despite the length, this is really only a brief summary! Some Body got their information by reverse engineering the games’ code, so it should be considered authoritative.

PMD has three times of actions, moving, attacking and using items. First they try to use an item–if there is no item to use, or the situation isn’t appropriate, or there’s a random component and they choose not to, they fall through to attacking. If there’s no one appropriate to attack, they fall through to moving or wandering. If they’re not pursuing a target and aren’t wandering, they wait in place.

Awake Pokemon try to reach a target: team members try to reach the leader (you)*, enemies try to reach a party member of yours. If they are following someone, they try to reach the target by default moving diagonally before moving orthogonally. This is good to know, and an effective strategy, since it’s harder to escape a cardinal-adjacent Pokemon than a diagonal-adjacent one. If a Pokemon has a target in sight but can’t move towards towards it, it doesn’t move.

(* Note: for teammates, this assumes the “Let’s Go Together” tactic is in effect. Generally, tactics settings are covered in the second video.)

No Pokemon can move towards a target they can’t see. Sight in Blue & Red Rescue Team is two spaces around them, or throughout a lit room they are in plus one space into corridors. Of course, invisible targets can’t be seen, even if they’re nearby. Note, a quirk of the Mystery Dungeon series generally: when standing in the first space of a corridor, you can only see slightly into the room, but everyone in the room can see you. While your default sight range in darkness is two spaces in the PMD1 games, instead of MD’s standard 1 space, you’re still a bit blind when moving into rooms. Notably, that two space distance around you is a square, so in corridors with bends in them you get a bit extra sight distance.

Now comes the interesting part (to people who are as obsessed with roguelikes as I am): what happens if a Pokemon loses sight of its target? In PMD1, it considers the last four locations the Pokemon was in, and tries to go to the one it was visible in most recently. Note in bent corridors, it becomes harder for a character to lose its target.

If the target is four turns outside of the follower’s sight, it has lost track of it, and the follower begins wandering randomly. This can happen if the Pokemon has never had a target (none has come into sight), or the target or follower teleports, the target moves over terrain the follower cannot cross, or the target moves away when the follower is occupied, or, due to the variety of events that can happen in the Mystery Dungeons, other ways.

Followers without targets wander randomly. When they spot a target, they cease moving randomly and pursue it. But if still wandering, in rooms, they pick a random exit, go to it and go down the corridor. In a corridor, they follow it until they reach a room (then entering it), or they reach an intersection. At an intersection, we see an interesting behavior: PMD1 occured before Chunsoft switched over to making wanderering monsters pick random directions at corridor intersections! In later Mystery Dungeon games, including later Pokemon Mystery Dungeons, wandering monsters go straight in intersections if they can. This is behavior that can be relied upon, but not in PMD1.

Outmatched Pokemon can decide to flee, essentially, moving away from their targets instead of towards. In rooms, they pick the exit furthermost from their pursuer, unless they moves them towards that pursuer; then they just try to get away as best they can, likely remaining in the room. A quirk of this: sometimes a fleeing monster breaks for an an exit that is more distant from the target, but not away from at attacker, giving it a free hit. The circumstances around this are complicated: the explanation begins at 7:16 in the first video.

For attacking, Pokemon have up to four moves, and a normal “attack.” This generic attack is not part of the main Pokemon game series. It was present in the first two PMD games, but after that became less effective. In the fourth and fifth PMD games, the normal attack only does five points of damage, and in the Switch remake of Rescue Team, it does no damage at all; it’s only a tool for passing time. But we’re still in the realm of PMD1, where “normal attacks” are not only useful but frequently used, because they don’t consume any PP.

Attacks are chosen based on a weighted average of all the usable moves. Each move has its own weight value; the normal attack weight’s varies according to the number of other moves available.

Ranged attacks are an interesting case. If a Pokemon has a ranged attack, and an enemy that can be attacked at a distance, it triggers the attack routine, where it picks a move from those available, but then only actually performs the move if the attack can reach its target. This can result in an attacker passing up opportunities to attack while an opponent approaches it. Out of fairness, room-range attack moves are only used by the AI when adjacent to an enemy.

Items have a bunch of minutiae associated with their use by the AI, but a lot of it is pretty ordinary. A few highlights: teammates can throw held negative status equipment at enemies, wild Pokemon start using items at Level 16, and there is only one Orb that wild Pokemon can use, and teammates can’t use it: the Rollcall Orb, for them, summons a number of other wild Pokemon into adjacency with them.

My Talk on Mystery Dungeon for Roguelike Celebration

They haven’t broken the talks apart into individual videos yet, but in the meantime you can see my presentation overview of the 31, give or take a couple depending on precise definition, games in the Mystery Dungeon series here, queued up to the proper starting point in the 8+ hour video. The talk portion is about half an hour long (with a couple of interruptions due to the router I was on being a bit flaky).

Here’s an embed, but note that WordPress doesn’t seem to accept the link for embedding with the time code linking directly to my talk, so you’ll have to skip ahead yourself to 6:10:18 to get to it. Or you could watch some of the other very interesting talks on the way there! Either way!

Roguelike Celebration 2024

Starting this Saturday at noon US Eastern time (9 AM Pacific, 5 PM Greenwich, 7 PM CEST) is Roguelike Celebration 2024! I’m presenting half an hour on the Mystery Dungeon games this year, at 3:15 PM Pacific/6:15 Eastern/11:15 Greenwich/1:15 AM Sunday CEST. Whew, the roundness of the Earth makes it difficult to express times!

It’s being held entirely online again this year, and offers a fun social space to explore that’s kind of like a MUD! Roguelike Celebration’s schedule is here, and you can get tickets for $30 for the whole event here. They usually set aside some free tickets for people who can’t afford the fee, although you might have to check around to find them.

Roguelike Celebration is nominally about roguelikes and procedural generation, but I think it’s interesting from a wide variety of gaming perspectives, and every year I find several talks that are incredibly interesting. Past years have offered presentations from people who worked on games as diverse as Kingdom of Loathing and Blaseball. Here are the talks being offered this year:

Saturday

  • Harry Solomons: Trampling on Ghosts: Hauntology and Permadeath
  • Cezar Capacle: Enhancing Narrative Through Randomness and Complications
  • Max Bottega: Keeping Art Direction interesting in a procedurally generated world
  • Stanley W. Baxton: Bringing Real-World Occultism into Your Games Without Accidentally Being Racist
  • Jeff Emtman and Martin Austwick: Neutrinowatch – the podcast that plays itself
  • Nic: Braided Narratives: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Linear Stories
  • Pandamander: “Out of Book,” The Psychology of Why Roguelikes Keep Us Playing
  • ?: Inverse Terrain Solver
  • Adrian: Probably Impossible – NecroDancer’s network code
  • John Harris: A Trip Through The Mystery Dungeons (psst: this is mine)
  • Marlowe Dobbe: A Swarm of Monsters is Hard To Build: Generating Visual Concepts for Enemies in Roguelikes
  • John Bond: Doors or no Doors: How Roguelike games take you places
  • Dan Norder: Chase, The BASIC Language Proto-Roguelike

Sunday

  • Yong Zhen Zhou: Who Controls the Controller? Thinking about physical player interactions outside a digital game
  • Tabea Iseli: Animal Crossing meets Roguelite Dungeon Crawler – The surprising genre mixture behind Grimoire Groves
  • Philomena Schwab: 100,000 wishlists in 3 months – Weird roguelikes are taking over the world
  • Kaysa Konopljak: Going legit with DotA: How to transform a thousand authors into four
  • Alexander Birke: Practical procedural world and story generation in Sea Of Rifts, a naval roguelike RPG
  • Robin Mendoza: The Use of Knowledge in the Labyrinth: The price mechanism as a storytelling device
  • Ollie: The Right Variety – Understanding and Visualising the Output Diversity of Your Generators
  • Eiríkr: Uxn – Permacomputing & Roguelikes
  • Brian Cronin: Black Box Sim for Roguelikes
  • Isaac Io Schankler: Orb Pondering Simulator LIVE!
  • ?: 7 Layer Dip, Multi-Layered Narratives For Roguelikes
  • Emily Halina: New Levels from a Single Example via Tree-based Reconstructive Partitioning (TRP)
  • Courtney: Cheating the System (By Design!) for Epic Combos
  • Joe: Magic in Game Design: (Mis)Directing the Player’s Attention
  • Tyler Coleman: Finding your 80/20 Rule with Proc-Gen
  • Nat: Procedurality and the Primes

The Rogue Archive

Hello everyone, I’m back! Today’s find is an archive of old versions of Rogue!

While there were games with aspects of Rogue before it conquered university Unix systems, like Beneath Apple Manor, Rogue still deserves its status as the namesake of the roguelikes. Its great popularity on campuses inspired a slew of expansions and variations.

The world of early roguelikes wavers in its documentation and preservation. There’s several early roguelikes that are nearly unplayable today: the Roguelike Restoration Project (their site appears to have returned to the internet in 2022) has tried to preserve them but its manager has time constraints. I know that Herb Chong, who created a variant called UltraRogue, is still around, and has expressed interest in getting the code running again, but it’s a difficult project, not the least reason for being that the original game saved games by creating and reloading raw chunks of memory. (Roguelike Restoration Project put the original source up here if anyone wants to take a crack at it.)

Several versions of UltraRogue, as well as many versions of Rogue, Advanced Rogue, Super Rogue, XRogue, and others, can be found on The Rogue Archive. Playing some of them might be difficult, but the code is there, sometimes in object form, sometimes as source. It preserves the code for Rog-O-Matic, the computer program that, itself, plays Rogue. You can even find more obscure variations of Rogue there, like HexRogue (which has become unplayable on its home site since Java support for browsers was abandoned), zRogue (an implementation for the Infocom zMachine), PalmOS versions, something called Advanced SuperTurbo Rogue Plus, and more.

I’ve always maintained my affection for Rogue, even if in the eyes of many it’s deficient in features these days. But that means it’s short, it won’t consume weeks of your free time to finish it, while it’s also complex enough to maintain interest, and challenging enough that it’ll take a while to master. If, in this Year of our Frog 2024, you haven’t tried Rogue yet, well, why not? You’ll probably die, but in the end, that’s better odds than real life!

A Japanese Youtuber Plays Rogue

I only have the barest understanding of Japanese, and the auto-translation on this video is pretty bad*, but I still found this Japanese Youtuber’s experience with the Steam release of Epyx Rogue to be interesting (27 minutes):

They keep using terms from Chunsoft’s Mystery Dungeon games, especially Torneko no Daibouken from the Super Famicom, but seem to have a good sense of how those items connect to and were inspired by Rogue.

Your armor weakens, oh my! “All the F words in the world were about to come out.”

They also die a lot. Because Rogue doesn’t want you to win. It was made for a community of players who would play it over and over, and were competing on shared scoreboards on university machines, and indefinite play makes for a poor measure of player skill. Standing and trading blows with every monster is a bad strategy in Rogue in the long run. Instead, it helps to run from strong enemies, to build up more hit points so as to defeat them, and sometimes in order to escape them to the next floor. Rogue’s monsters grow in strength as you descend fairly quickly, and the player is usually not far ahead of them in the power curve. Then around the time Trolls show up they’re roughly an even match, and they keep getting tougher. The point where the monsters become stronger than the player is different every game, and depends a lot on which items the player has found and has identified, but it always comes eventually. They eventually get pretty far, dying on their fifth attempt to a Griffin on Level 18.

*
“Water supply texture: Say goodbye to the smell of raw oysters.”
“The Dora doll’s twisty honey positive is getting warmer.”
“I miss the days when I used to go Hee Hee in Centauros.”
“Let’s quickly wash and throw away the rotten plastic bottles we drank from.”
Tell me more, auto translate bot!

@Play: Which Is Better, Ring Mail or Splint Mail?

‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.

Gary Gygax was a weird person. I won’t get into his life or history or, the casual misogyny of AD&D character creation, or the Random Harlot Table. But he did know a lot about medieval weaponry and armor, and to some degree this obsessive interest seeped out and infected a whole generation of nerds.

How useful is this armor in protecting someone? Five. It is five useful. (Image from National Museum in Krakow)

I know which is generally better: leather armor, studded leather armor, ring mail, chain mail, splint mail, plate mail or plate armor. I know that, although in life each is different, battles are random, and there’s countless factors that might determine who would win in a fight, the order in which I have given them is roughly how effective they are, because it’s the order that Armor Class increases, sorry decreases, in classic Dungeons & Dragons.

While the list of armors is presented, in practically every Player’s Handbook, with their effects on protection right there in order, unless you’re steeped in the material, it is not obvious, just from reading the names of the items, which is supposed to be better than another.

Splint Mail was rare in Europe during the medieval period. It’s also really hard to Google Image Search for without ending up with pictures taken from D&D material!(Image from Wikipedia)

This is a considerable roadblock, and one I struggled with for a while, when I first tried to learn to play Rogue, because that game expects you to know how effective each piece of armor is. You start out with Ring Mail +1. You find a suit of Splint Mail. Should you switch? People who play nearly any classic roguelike are going to run against this eventually. Even now, some games just expect you to know the relative strengths of each.

If you decide to take the chance and try it on, to Rogue’s (and Nethack’s) credit, it tells you immediately how effective the armor is on the status line, and you can compare its value to your past item. To Rogue’s (and Nethack’s) detriment though, if the new armor is cursed, you’re stuck with it, until you can lift the curse (to a new player, unlikely) or die (very likely). And then, unless you’ve been taking notes, you’ll still probably forget the relationship between the two items, meaning you’ll have to guess their relative value again later, and deal with the same risk.

Classic D&D tended to give short shrift to the intricacies of real-life armor use, simplifying a complex topic beyond perhaps what was appropriate. AD&D attempted to remedy that by going overboard, giving each armor ratings according to its bulkiness, how much of the wearer’s body it covered, how much it weighed and how it restricted movement. Gygax’s tendency towards simulation is responsible for some of the most interesting parts of the game, but it didn’t help him here I think.

Most classic roguelikes, at least, use the “bag of Armor Class” approach to armor, which is probably for the best. Nethack probably goes to far in the Gygaxian direction. If you find Plate Mail in Nethack, you’re almost entirely better off just leaving it on the ground, even despite armor’s huge value, because it’s simply too heavy. Even if you can carry it without dipping into Burdened status, or, heaven help you, Stressed, its mass and bulk lowers the number of other items you can carry before you reach Stressed, and carrying many other items is of great importance. This is the secret reason that the various colors of Dragon Scale Mail are so powerful in Nethack: it’s not that they have the highest best AC in the game (though they do), it’s that they’re also really light! Even if you don’t get the color you want, it takes concern about the weight of armor completely off your list of worries.

The use of armor underwent revision throughout D&D’s development. (This page lists the changes in detail.) For reference, the relative quality of D&D, and thus roguelike, armor goes like this.

NameNew-Style Ascending Armor ClassOld-Style Descending Armor Class
Leather Armor28
Studded Leather & Ring Mail37
Scale Mail46
Chain Mail55
Splint Mail & Banded Mail64
Plate Mail73
Plate Armor82

Why the difference in values? Up until the 3rd edition of D&D, Armor Class started at 10 and counted down as it improved. 3E updated a lot of the game’s math, and changed the combat formula so that AC was a bonus to the defender’s chance to be missed instead of a penalty to the attacker’s chance to strike. Because of that, now it starts at 10 and counts up. The changeover was a whole to-do, I assure you, but now two editions later we barely look back. Back in that day others were confused by the system too, and even Rogue used an ascending armor score. But Nethack, to this day, uses original D&D’s decreasing armor class system.

If you compare those values to those used in 5th Edition, you’ll notice that even the new-style numbers don’t match up completely. As I said, while the relative strengths have remained consistent, if not constant, the numbers continue to change slightly between versions.

That concludes this introductory level class. You’re dismissed! If you’re looking into the relative effects of different polearms… that’s the graduate-level seminar, down the hall.